by Tim Cahill
There were many ruins our expedition didn’t reach for simple lack of time. There are said to be circular habitations above Pisuquia, and in the mountains surrounding Pueblo Alto and Pueblo Alto South. One valley over from Santa Rosa, people talk of finding perfectly preserved mummies. On a mountain across from Fort Cahill we saw a series of ancient terraces, obviously man-made, and their size suggested impressive ruins to be found there. In a place called Chilchos there are said to be mountaintop fortresses. An ancient pre-Inca road leads out of Chilchos into the jungle. No one knows where it goes.
I keep thinking about that road. It leads out of Chilchos. Into the jungle. And no one knows where it goes.
Down Under
and Thereabouts
The Reception at Bamaga
Many people on Thursday Island had already purchased their television sets. There was no station, no transmitter on the island when I was there in late 1981; that was still a year or two in the future. Nevertheless, dozens of families—the Malays, Japanese, Chinese, Melanesians, and Australians—had blank and useless electronic gods set up in their living rooms. Some spent entire evenings in front of the Sony worship altars they had constructed, praying, apparently, for the blessed advent of Starsky and Hutch reruns.
I asked a shopkeeper on the island if the signal, when it began, would reach the mainland and Bamaga.
“You bet,” he said.
I absorbed the information with a syrupy and sad sense of regret. This is not to say that I am a man who abhors television. I watch local and national news, Nova, movies that feature giant insects, and anything that’s on when I can’t sleep. When someone catches me watching something so mindless as to be embarrassing, I feign anthropological interest. Last week Howard Cosell told me that The Battle of the Network Stars was sport in its purest sense, and I did not rush screaming from the room.
I suppose my objection to bringing television to remote parts of the world constitutes cultural arrogance. Who am I to deprive those in Bamaga of Charlie’s Angels?
But let me tell you about Bamaga. It is one of the few places in the world that can legitimately be considered the end of the earth. Bamaga is a small town at the tip of the Cape York peninsula, a five-hundred-mile-long finger of land sticking up out of the northeast corner of Australia. To get there, you travel over an arid, baking, unmarked road known (from this day forward) as the Miles of Masochism. This is a rotten road, littered with the corpses of failed four-wheelers. I traveled it with a commercial outfit, Kamp-out Safaris, in a brutish four-wheel-drive bus known appropriately as the Beast. There were seventeen of us aboard, and every once in a while sixteen of us would have to stand outside, shoulder to the Beast, attempting to shove this road warrior out of some steep, muddy river bottom. One hundred miles of masochism a day was pretty good time on that trip, and on the fifth day, five hundred miles out of Cairns, we hit the Jardine River.
Most people who four-wheel it up the peninsula quit at the Jardine, only a few miles from the ocean and the end of the world. There is no bridge on the river, which is wide, fast, deep, and famous for the saltwater crocodiles that visit it. Like American alligators, these unreconstructed saurians like to drown their prey and secrete the victim in some underwater hidey-hole. They return to the feast over a period of days, like a man making repeated midnight raids on the remnants of a holiday turkey. Only days before our arrival a local man had been found washed up on the banks of the Jardine. Perhaps he had simply drowned while swimming the river, but the body was severely lacerated. That might have been caused by snags. The suspicion was that he had been “taken” by a croc.
We all piled out of the bus after storing our gear in the overhead racks. An extension was fitted to the exhaust pipe that made it stick up over the top of the bus like a submarine’s periscope. The Beast’s tires were deflated for more purchase on the sandy river bottom. The driver, after scouting the river for a couple of hours, revved up the Beast and made a run at the waist-deep water. The sixteen of us sloshed alongside the Beast, alert for beasts.
If the Jardine defeats most travelers, it is also a kind of cultural dividing point. On the south side, the native people are Australian aborigines: tall, slender, elegant people, chocolate brown in color. Bamaga, the only town of any consequence on the north side of the river, is populated by people from the Torres Strait islands. The strait is a seventy-mile stretch of water between Cape York and New Guinea. The island people are darker and more African in appearance. Most of the young men are built like NFL linebackers; three-hundred-pounders are not uncommon. The older men and women tend toward a certain Samoan immensity.
The Torres Strait islanders never penetrated very deeply into the outback. Unlike the aborigines, they could not adapt to a land where water and game were scarce. But it was the islanders who introduced the drum and masked ritual dancing to Australia. Such is the effect of one people on another.
The first thing I noticed on the short jolting ride from the Jardine to Bamaga was the community graveyard. It was an oasis of flowers and grass in a wasteland of ocher dust. The tombstones were ornate, almost gaudy examples of the monument-maker’s art. Many of them had recessed and glassed-over niches, and one of them contained a small crocodile carved out of semiprecious stone. Each tombstone was engraved with a few glowing paragraphs recording a man’s or woman’s life.
Some of the tombstones were wrapped in dark plastic, secured with baling twine and duct tape. Later, as we set up camp on a windswept expanse of beach, I found myself wondering about those blanked-out tombstones. About that time a group of island men approached camp. They looked like the front line of the Dallas Cowboys, and from them we learned the secret of the wrapped tombstones.
More than two years ago, the men said, their relative, Elikum Tom, had died. It had taken them all this time to pay for the stone and amass enough funds for a great feast. It was the way among the families of Bamaga. Everyone, including us, was invited to the unveiling of Elikum Tom’s tombstone, and to the feast.
The ceremony at the gravesite was short, dignified, Protestant in nature. The banquet, given the circumstances, was entirely formal. Long tables had been set up in the dusty courtyard of a rickety tin building that turned-out to be the Anglican church. A platter piled with dark fillets was passed, and I took a politely substantial portion. One of the women remarked that most white people didn’t seem to care for baked turtle lung. There was a linebacker to my left, one to my right, and the lung tasted like cardboard jelly soaked in fermented blood.
“Good,” I choked, “baked turtle lung. Good!”
The banquet ended at about dusk. The tables were moved, and people sat in a rough circle surrounding the dusty courtyard. A man set out a four-foot-long log, painted in black and white checks. Another sat beside him, an empty kerosene tin between his legs. There was a hush, and the two men brought out their sticks. They began beating out a rhythm that was East Indian in complexity. And then, from a corner behind the church, the first set of dancers strutted out: ten men in sleeveless white T-shirts and grass skirts. All were barefoot, and each man wore a strip of cloth around his ankles.
The dance, properly described, was more of a stomp, and the movements were martial, reminiscent of karate katas. There was a great deal of muscle flexing, featuring some awesomely impressive muscles. The women sang to the beat of the drums, sang in their own language, a strange, joyful, high-pitched song. The men wore fierce, rapturous expressions, and each powerful stomp raised a tiny bomb-burst of dust.
The dance might have been almost frightening, except that there were catcalls and a good deal of laughter from the audience, primarily because small children in the back of the column tried to imitate the men. They often fell or stumbled, or simply looked adorable and silly trying to flex skinny five-year-old muscles.
The men danced for fifteen minutes or so, then abandoned the courtyard to a group of scruffy dogs and wrestling children. Soon enough, a group of women in orange blouses and grass skirts glided ou
t from behind the church to dance while the men sang. Little girls fell over trying to follow the movements. There were other dances: teenagers danced, groups of men and women, groups that had obviously practiced more than others. This went on all night—men dancing and flexing, women gliding—until it seemed everyone who lived in Bamaga had performed several times. There was some drinking—the local beer was strong, the rum harsh—and a lot of good-natured bantering; “I a more better dancer than you, Charlie.”
People wandered about the audience. Some of them spoke of Elikum Tom. They remembered his adventures, the funny things he had done. His death had drawn all these people together, and made them closer. By dawn we were all exhausted. Out on the beach, by our camp, I could see a florid tropical sun rising over Horn Island, with the provincial center, Thursday Island, just visible behind it.
Soon there will be television on Thursday Island, and the signal will reach Bamaga, People, I think, will still go to wakes like the one for Elikum Tom. They will pay their respects at the graveyard, eat with the family, but I hear them making flimsy excuses, leaving early. I see them dashing home in order to see automobiles crashing into light poles in Los Angeles.
The people of Bamaga will learn more of the outside world, and will know less of their own. They will, sad to say, know more of us than we will ever know of them.
To the Place
of Walleroo Dreaming
I will dream the artist dreaming: In life the artist was a tall, thin man with chocolate brown skin, curly black hair, and sharp, angular features. He was missing a tooth at the front of his mouth, and there were concentric circular scars on both sides of his chest. He wore a whitened bone—the small rib of a kangaroo—through the hole in his nasal septum. Now, in the heaven called Woolunda, he sits in a curious, liquid posture, as if his bones had no consistency to them. There is a feast spread out at his feet, more food than he has ever seen at one time in his life: There is honey, and meat from the kangaroo and possum and emu, there is the fish called barramundi. Dozens of young women lie, decoratively, all about him. They smile and blush prettily. The artist may have any—or all of them—for wife. The artist exists there, like that, throughout past and present and future, throughout the whole of time. His spirit is secure: It is represented on the rock, at the Place of Walleroo Dreaming.
Dreaming the dreams of another people, of a culture now nearly dead, is a treacherous and ethereal enterprise. One must look closely to the artists sources, and sometimes the search for sources has the quality of the dream itself.
I began to learn of the Dream Time from another white man, Percy Trezise. It was a warm summer evening on the Cape York Peninsula at the far northeast corner of the Australian continent. The Joonging, as the Australian aboriginals call them, the flying-fox people, were camped in a canyon to the west, half a million strong. They came at us just after sunset, when the sky was still rich with florid tropical pastels. Their bodies were dark, fierce against the dying light. They flew straight, like ducks, only slower, and there was none of that erratic darting about that one associates with most bats.
The largest of them had a wingspan well over four feet, and the sound they made was a steady foof-foof, two beats of the great dark wings a second. All together they sounded like the howl of a wind-driven rain, like the howl of a distant hurricane before landfall.
“I painted this once,” Percy Trezise said. He is a solid, exuberant man, muscular, with gray hair and a gray beard. He jacked three shells into a 20-gauge shotgun, and the dingo bitch, Lahsa, capered at his feet.
We were standing in a clearing beyond the open-sided shed where Percy Trezise paints his award-winning outback scenes. The forest around us was dense with eucalyptus, thin-trunked, stringy-barked trees every ten steps or so. In the grasses of the flat forest floor, between the trees, were dozens of mounds constructed by compass termites. The nests were thin-bladed little monoliths, three to five feet high, and so hard that an ax struck against them raised sparks. The gables and spires along the tops of the blades and the buttresses fanning out below gave them the look of Gothic cathedrals, though they lacked certain essential symmetries. One thought of alternate universes, of a time before men, of the Dream Time.
The major blade of each nest pointed north, due north, toward the sun, so that the temperature within them was intensified and the secretions of the creatures who lived there hardened that much quicker. It is said that aboriginal people used a stick of ironwood and a rock to pound holes in the nests and that murder victims were hidden there. In two or three days the hole would be covered over and the bones would be eaten.
Percy Trezise raised the shotgun to his shoulder, and the dingo whimpered in anticipation. Lahsa was about the size of an Airedale, a solid, beige-yellow animal with white boots and a white tip on her tail. Trezise had raised her from a pup, and she was as affectionate and responsive as any domestic dog. The dingo is one of the few nonmarsupial mammals native to Australia, a wild dog brought to the isolated continent by aboriginal people sometime during the Pleistocene. Placental mammals, the dingoes were more efficient predators than the marsupials that flourished in Australia, and they contributed, through competition, to the extermination of the marsupial Tasmanian wolf and Tasmanian devil. With the white settlement of Australia, dingoes began feeding on sheep and poultry. And, like the coyote in America, they have been eliminated in most areas for all the same reasons.
“The dingoes used to feed on the flying foxes,” Trezise said, “but there are so few of them anymore that the foxes are breeding out of hand.”
The wall of darkness was on us then, like a eclipse slicing over the land. Trezise fired three times. Two of the great bats thumped to earth. Lahsa ran to the first. There was the sound of ripping parchment, then the cracking of small bones.
I looked at the other fox; it was almost pretty. It had velvety black fur and a long, doglike snout—not the pushed-in face and fangs you find on those bats in your attic—and it was big: a foot and a half long, with plenty of meat on it.
“If I didn’t feed her on the foxes,” Trezise said, “she’d be out killing wallabies, and we don’t have many of those left.” The wallaby is a medium-sized fellow as kangaroos go, and stands about three feet high.
Trezise fired three more times, but it was getting dark, and he only pulled down one of the foxes. The rest of the Joonging were settling into paper-bark trees that grew in the small gullies leading down to the Little Laura River. But before they could begin their night’s feeding on the blossoms, they had to deal with the kookaburras nested there.
Kookaburras are large, belligerent birds, about half again the size of a blue jay. They feed on snakes and lizards, and their braying fifteen- to twenty-second-long calls are usually described as sounding like fiendish laughter. The vocalization begins with a high-pitched squawk, degenerates into a hohohoho, hahahaha sound, then tapers off into infectious chuckles. The sound is at once so human and so obviously inhuman that it seems crazed, maniacal. There hadn’t been any of that mocking laughter for more than half an hour, but now the kookaburras were defending their nest sites from the flying foxes, and the darkness all about us was filled with hideous, hysterical laughter.
I felt vaguely somnambulant, surreal, standing among those little Gothic cathedrals filled with the digested and secreted bones of the long dead, standing in the receding rush of the invasion of the flying-fox people. It seemed a good time to ask Percy Trezise if he would, please, escort me into the Dream Time. In the darkness all around, the kookaburras shrieked out their mad laughter.
Percy Trezise grew up in the south of Australia, and in 1938—he remembers the year still—he won a book about aboriginal culture in a school essay contest. The book ignited his imagination and led to a lifelong obsession. After a few unsatisfactory adult years in the south, Trezise moved his family to far north Queensland, to a city at the base of the Cape York Peninsula.
In September 1960—another date Trezise remembers with precision—he v
isited the Split Rock gallery, south of the town of Laura. A road crew had just discovered the site: a huge sandstone block, nearly a hundred feet high, covered with aboriginal rock paintings and engravings. There were recognizable kangaroos, emus, fish, possums; there were strange, elongated figures, spirit figures called quinkans, with upraised arms and strangely shaped heads. They looked like El Greco figures as interpreted by Yves Tanguy.
Some of the paintings were superimposed on others, some had obviously been repainted; some were crudely drawn, others were magnificent, genuine works of art.
There was a history there, Trezise knew, the record of a culture, a record that encompassed countless centuries.
Not much was known about the rock art of the area. Cape York is said to be the second largest wilderness area left in the world. The soil is so sandy and the rainy season so wet that established rivers overflow their banks, and impromptu rivers spring up everywhere, washing out roads and airstrips, toppling buildings. To live in Cape York is to spend several months of the year in a cold, mosquito-infested bog. Not many people do.
The peninsula measures three hundred miles across at its base and tapers off five hundred miles north to a windy, wave-battered, seldom-visited point called Cape York. The peninsula, which separates the Coral Sea from the Arafura Sea, is a finger of land that sticks up into the Torres Strait as if to prod the soft underbelly of New Guinea.
Two hundred million years ago the area was a vast inland sea, and the sea laid down deep beds of sandstone. Over the millennia the sea fell back. Wind, weather, and rushing rivers carved out mesas and plateaus, so that today the peninsula is a jumble of flat forest, low mountains, and sandstone cliffs. In the cavelike overhangs of these cliffs, aboriginal people made temporary camps, moving with the game, with the ripening of fruits and greens.